Of all the people in the world we should be most suspicious of, it’s those who talk about connectedness, the idea that we should remain virtually hard wired into a network of other people’s networks and experiences, permanent receivers of their fuzz and meaningless brain static.
Some would say it’s better, like Stephen Wilkinson has done, to drift, to float between different relative existences and render all the solid boundaries permeable. As Bibio, Wilkinson has made music which has extolled the virtues of being willo-the-wisp, an existence slipping from mood to mood and always appearing to be a fingertip away from being brought to stillness.
By 2017’s Phantom Brickworks, this career odyssey extended to what was a collection of mystical, darkly ambient murmurs made from ambient loops and field recordings turned inside out, a clutched photo negative with no explanations. Ribbons, it seems, is intended to return us to the sunshine again, a record that feels the breeze, full of acoustic and analogue ephemera and in places as carefree as any music Wilkinson has ever released.
Nowhere here is this more evident than on The Art Of Living, a bucolic, seventies-leaning ditty that splices the realms of folktastic playfulness and blurred old documentary theme tunes, the singer’s gentle falsetto hazily weaving, an enchantment repeated on the faerie tones of Curls.
If Phantom Brickworks was partly inspired by our relationship with the afterlife, much of Ribbons is sprung from sensual things that prejudice and progress cannot taint; songs with titles like Valley Wulf, Watch The Flies and Under A Lone Ash are gentle and tactile, reminders that above all the curious atmospheres the producer revels in, what sounds like almost organic matter he produces is in reality an ingenious bricolage derived from endless studio conjurations.
This may sound a little gnostic, but equally there are no maps here, the traditionalist reel of Eraydiddar-Eriddar squared by what appears to be a children’s choir whispering just out of earshot, a hypnotic flute beckoning them away to somewhere they may never return from.
Unsignposted yes, but that patchwork destination is one of many which you can end up at in the Bibio multiverse, such that when the elegant, gently shuffling Bossa of Old Graffiti arrives there’s no surprise, even less so in the altered states of soul which Before so happily occupies.
Surprises in a maze like that lead to the conclusion that in many ways Stephen Wilkinson is never happier than when dealing in the ambiguous, by contrast to so many artists that make such a fuss of identity. There are parts of Ribbons which are pristine, direct and gorgeous, like dancers coming into focus from out of a heat haze on the laziest of summer afternoons. Equally though, the caravan of players and their instruments – or at least the impression of them – lets those in the eye of its storm be lost, if only for a few minutes.
One of many, they drift, as will you.
